One of the legacies of Modernist thought is the understanding that an entire culture can be derived from an artifact, and that the assembly of artifacts from multiple cultures can form a new whole. Modernism is as an invention of anthropology as anything else: the invention of “the primitive” as a category, the novel understanding of ritual action and symbolic exchanges, and the tensions between seemingly incommensurable systems of belief give rise to the formal innovations of the period. It is not simply that, to borrow the phrase of Andre Malraux, the poet was placed in an imaginary museum, but that poetry took a cue from the great European museums of the 19th century. The poem became an imaginary museum. William Empson, late for the modernist explosion, but well placed to feel its reverberations, channels the energy in his “Homage to the British Museum,” as well as in his critical quip that “a profound enough criticism could extract an entire cultural history from a simple lyric.”[i] For Empson, poetry could aspire to get the whole of a culture’s judgments within itself, to integrate them there.

In the eyes of some, Modernism (in the singular noun especially) has itself become a relic of the past. But just as Modernism inherited and reworked the possibilities of the early 19th century, the late 20th and early 21st centuries have been populated by poets who, though not lineal descendants from the Modernist generation, have absorbed their deities into their local cults—not to be thoughtlessly worshipped but to be appeased, resisted, and invoked. Polytheism empowers human judgment, and we can know poets by how they judge.

The final lines of Jim Powell’s recent chapbook collection, Assembling the Bomb, translate Sophocles in a poem that is titled “Self-Expression”:

Why object or feel betrayed

when these reject what is well made

preferring gesture over act,

pleased by conceit, commending fakes

until you ache? Like calls to like,

fools are mirrored in their follies:

some love the child, some love dollies.

Choice is self-expression. All

points of view reveal an eye.

One gardener culls table greens

where another pulls out weeds.

Each to his own. Seeds germinate

in fertile earth, not on stones.

Judges are judged by their judgments.

“Object” is a belated pun: in light of the “well made,” “dollies,” “fakes,” we can imagine the stress on the first syllable: “an object,” not “to object.” Maybe this reveals my eye, or my “I,” since it is a larger union of sight and sound that leads me to believe in this possibility. This might be folly on my part except that this is a poem that seeks for us to see correspondences in viewer and viewed, doer and deed: “fools are reflected in their follies.”  “I” is reflected in “eye.” And “object” is reflected in “object,” but the coincidence of sound that links these words is other than the etymological unity of “fools” and “follies,” which are not merely reflected but part and parcel. The real reflection happens in the one exact rhyme of the poem, at the line ending of “follies” and “dollies,” which alerts us to the folly of loving the doll instead of the real child, the object instead of the real thing. Why the object? Why object to the preference for the object? Because “Choice is self-expression,” because “each to his own” does not, after what has been said, mean that it’s fine no matter what you choose, but that what you choose reveals who you are. The line from Sophocles: “Judges are judged by their judgments.” But in so far as poem is “self-expression” too, a fertile earth in which seeds may germinate, or not, poets are likewise judged by their judgments. Powell’s anxiety here is self-aware: to be pleased by conceit is to be pleased by arrogance, but also to be pleased by a poetic conceit that might yoke together in simile or metaphor what should not properly be joined.

The poem enjoins readers to recognize “what is well made,” what is real, to distinguish the “greens” from the “weeds,” and this because a poem is embraced or rejected by the judgment of others. The “you” of “until you ache” is any poet but also this poet, and “ache” rhymes with “fake” because the poem is haunted by the inauthentic. In much of Powell’s most recent collection lies, deceptions, feigned and forced ignorance are its recurrent subjects, symptoms and infections of political life. “Judges are judged by their judgments” points to the continuity of critics of poetry and the judges of human affairs, backed by monopolized and legitimized violence. If we judge amiss in the one realm, how can we expect to do better in the other? But the judges are also poets.

The poets who would write poems that are museums must distinguish between what is real and what is fake, testing the collection that they assemble. One of the best poems in the collection is titled, lending its name to the collection itself, “Assembling the Bomb”:

.

The complete device comprises

manifold sub-assemblies, with these

minutely re-divided and fabricated

separately in private offices by process

best known to the contriver alone

who performs his role wholly

ignorant of where his share

fits in the scheme of the machine

or to what hidden end it tends.

On all hands each understands

his own solely, totally

secured from blame and shame.

Ignorance is innocence.

Each must act his part apart

costumed in choiceless choices.

No one is allowed aloud

to inquire into the hierarchy

or try to situate his place

or ask what purposes his task

enacts for an unseen regime.

Above the labyrinth, up on top

a few, the elect of an exclusive

milieu, command a central view.

Deniability is key.

.

The interlocking rhymes within and between lines draws the poems parts tight—self-consciously too tight at times, as in “no one is allowed aloud,” where the effect is stifling, the repeated homophones smothering one another’s meanings. This is a poem about an excess of fit, and the deprivation of independent judgment that it entails and requires. Or rather, that is what it is ultimately about: the Manhattan Project’s organization, sequestered individuals working with maximally limited information in order to assemble a bomb, and it is about a dream of modernity turned nightmare, an extreme of efficiency that denies individuals understanding of the whole of which they are a part, to which they contribute. They are assembled as much as they assemble; their scope and powers of judgment are mechanized. In this poem, there is no space for the “self-expression” of choice. Deniability is key and is the key that unlocks the whole, opens it out onto the disavowal of responsibility that is at its choice (“costumed in choiceless choices”).

And yet, “Assembling the Bomb” can be read as an account of what life in a complex integrated society must be like: we cannot know the whole to which we contribute, we are only allowed to critique the system from within its rules of acceptable criticism, and the deniability that is key is of the essence of what it is for a system to exist: it makes it impossible to point to a single point or person for blame. Judgement is defused as blame and responsibility are diffused, and this is because every event and trend in complex societies has more variables than we can fix or know. The poem accounts for what it scorns.

Failure to judge properly, and to be known by one’s judgments, is the risk necessary for poetry, and that failure is only permitted when the process and goal of assembling parts into a whole, distinguishing one from another, and determining right and wrong fit are available to the understanding and imagination. Confronting and drawing into relation incompatible, relativistic ways of understanding the world, through irony or ideogram, Modernist techniques would make the unity of “Assembling the Bomb” an impossibility—a false unity since it does not contain the possibility of incoherence. In this, “Assembling the Bomb” is an indictment of modern life run amok.

The trouble for a Modernist poet that would aspire to contain everything, to create a whole that relates parts, however much uncertainty, relativity, disjuncture it accommodates into its structure, is that it can feel as if the spaces it leaves in the relations of parts to whole constitute another form of deniability: any attempt at explaining why its choices are what they are and to judge its judgments can be met with a refusal to accept the explanation on the grounds that it cannot be definitive. This works when the poems both thematize and dramatize the groundlessness of all judgments, the resistance of life and action to a unified whole of purpose or ends (interrupted by desire, by lassitude, by spiritual desiccation, by history), and the yearning for a transcendent vantage point, sometimes glimpsed but, in the worldly language of a poem, disappointed. Here we find the peaks of Eliot, Pound, Stevens, and late Yeats.  

Not all poets seek to assemble a museum—and poets following them returned to other traditions and ideals of what poetry might do, though they had absorbed the awareness of relativity and discontinuity that these poets had found. The cost was often an abandonment of the epic ideal to which Modernists had clung: a record of an entire civilization, the recasting in poetry of history as a whole greater than a single life, the immensity of the world’s variety brought into a verse in relation not to a single self-conscious experience, but in relation to itself.

Jim Powell has not abandoned the Modernist ambition but has inverted its method. “Assembling the Bomb” is itself the “key” to his poetry because it points us to the position in which he places himself: not as “the elect” surveying a general view of cultures and eras and civilizations all at once, but as a person writing poems that occupy knowingly limited pieces of a larger whole and that take shape. The poems are assembled into distinct wholes according to the principle that they need, in their design, to indicate the complex contours, features, or dynamics of the still greater wholes of which they are part.  The criteria by which Powell’s poems are complete assemblages of words is that, when complete, they convey sufficiently, from their limited horizons, the nature of what is beyond their ken. In other words, they are written to be artifacts of a larger whole, their own balance and inner unity measured by their bringing order, in emblematic miniature, to the larger culture of which they are fragments.

Powell, then, is also a poet-as-anthropologist. He tells us what he is not in his sonnet, “Spectacle”:

The acrobatic little shark-faced man behind dark glasses

in the back seat of the buff beige Mercedes limousine,

precision-tailored suit, silk shirt, gold cuff-links, watch to match,

silver cigarette-case open in an accustomed hand:

one glance—uninquisitive, empowered, disdainful, bored.

What’s he doing in mid-afternoon on an untrafficked

residential street—inspecting investment properties?

--retrieving one of his string of girls?—circling for prey?

Star of his inner movie in the role of Mr. Big,

two thick-necked characters seated up front wearing their parts

as tight as skin, pinhead chauffeur and glaring bodyguard:

each niche in the social ecology fulfilled somewhere

in the plenitude of creation enacted as a spectacle

for the passing taxonomist reflected in dark glasses.

The sequence of observations in the entire first stanza is impelled towards the surprise of “accustomed,” a word that places what we have seen in the scheme of customary rites and the “customs” that are ways of life. The villain of the poem, a villain of the world, affords only one “glance” in opposition to the poet’s steady gaze; whereas the glance is exploitative and extractive, “circling for prey,” “inspecting investment properties,” “retrieving one of his string of girls,” the poet-as-ethnographer is a “taxonomist” who passes by, reflected in the “dark glasses” that enclose the poem’s action, ending its first line and its last. “Taxonomist” is set against the taxes imposed by the “shark-faced man”; the poet’s eye for customs is other than the man’s demand for customs (the sort that are paid, demanded by those who guard borders, rather than discerning them). The first stanza lists the attributes of the man; the second lists the attributes of his gaze. The sum total, the poem suggests, ought to be obvious; the man is “uninquisitive,” but the poet inquires: why is he here? He does not fit. And in that misfit, the speculation begins, and the poem is drawn into a fantasy of what he might be. It is a poem that lets itself hate the type of man that this seems to be—a sort of hate that we disown in others but experience in ourselves. In the third stanza, when he imagines that the man is playing a “role of Mr. Big,” he has been cast by the poet, fitting him into the available schema. “Wearing their parts” means they wear guns, but also that they have adopted parts, roles that disguise who they are; and that they wear them down. “Pinhead chauffeur and glaring bodyguard” needs to be seen as a reductive cliché, one to which they have reduced themselves, one to which the poet has reduced them, and also one that a spectacle society reduces its members, who become snapshots rather than identities. Pinheads are surfaces that catch the sun (“glaring”), reproducible as the pinheads of Adam Smith’s factory.

Then, in the fourth stanza, something happens: the word that we might have heard in our own judgments, “cliché,” is absorbed and modified into “niche.”  The poem expands; the feeling of contempt for this man is released into a calm. He is more “shark” than “shark-faced,” part of the “social ecology,” and the poem checks its judgment and converts it into a breadth of imagination that knows there to be an immensity of things beyond the man’s comprehension, beyond even the poem’s containment: “the plenitude of creation.” The language sounds with the register of the sacred, and the final two lines of the poem have likewise been transformed. Seeing himself “reflected in dark glasses,” the poet imagines that he is himself seen by the man. “Dark glasses” has been charged with the phrasing of the Bible, Corinthians 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” He is himself a “part” of the “plenitude,” and the poem likewise; reflected in dark glasses, it may be that he is judged in turn by the man he has judged, a judgment limited as his own, the man’s body and social role alien to his own, but a member of the same greater body, not of Christ, but of the broader “somewhere” that cannot be named or placed within the poem.

Powell’s poetry does not presume to assemble that plenitude, but to recover its energies and elements from smaller instants of experience. As an undertaking, this is civic, historical, and political at once, where those three terms overlap, sometimes more and sometimes less. Powell’s collection Substrate and the sequence “Substrate,” which I wrote about in an earlier post, exemplifies and realizes the ambition. Its poems drawn from instants of the history of the North American West are artifacts that testify to an immensity of such complexity that an outside, “up on top” view from above the labyrinth would fail to apprehend its nature and design. Assembling the Bomb carries on this work, but its poems more often reflect on the work itself and more antagonistically set Powell’s work against what are false, deceptive, manipulative ways of imagining historical life, political existence, and the “social ecology.”  

“Undercover” is a poem that takes as its subject an affair and the lies that bind a marriage together—but from the start, its language suggests the ecological in the “undercover” of a forest, and then the political, with the secrets of a state, so that what it is about as much as intimate deception is the betrayal of the self and betrayal of any union when it seals itself with a lie in order not to look beyond its fantasy of what it is (its ideology), in order not to admit its relation to more than it can contain, to the other relationships of which it is necessarily a part. Here is “Undercover”:

First a secret

needing to be kept

propagates a story

in re:    where you slept

letting drop

a planted clue

to cover up

for the real you

with false leads

to preserve the state

of matrimony

and cheat your fate

except you suspect

you are caught out

and to detect

disposition to doubt

hint to test

who might have confessed

then move to protect

the official version

counteract

subversive fact

allay suspicion

and save the union

so covert means

dictate policy

to a rogue chicanery

and the privacy

of deceit locks down

as contagion

and regimen

until the secret’s

government topples

or else the couple

elects a new one.

In their formal qualities, the clipped lines and tight rhymes both replicate the stunted density of the undergrowth that is undercover and push through it, the poem clearing a space within it. The lines are taut with, and strain against, both anxiety and accusation. “Undercover” means disguised but also the cover of a forest floor, which is why the metaphor of a “planted clue” is not arbitrary. The poem is about the growth of lies, the growth of suspicions, and the growth of renewed lies, and though its occasion is seemingly personal, by the poem’s end, the only language available to describe their machinations of deception is drawn from politics.

“First a secret”: in the beginning was the word and the word was hidden; this is an obscuring act of creation, rather than one of “plenitude.” It draws in, rather than opening out. A secret is, by definition, that which “needs to be kept,” and so the explicit “Needing to be kept” has the effect of unfolding out only to fold more tightly in; it is an explanation that seals more tightly, offering nothing more than what it is. It also establishes the true subject of the poem’s action: the secret itself, its sovereignty or “government.” The state of secrecy overcomes the state of matrimony, but is also essential to its survival, and to the survival of “the state.” There is, beneath this poem, a suspicion of monogamy taken to an extreme as well as state power taken to its extreme: both close off, “dictate,” and entail not “the deceit of privacy” as we might expect but instead “the privacy | of deceit,” so that the entire state adheres to a logic of a private space: to live in a lie is to be consigned to an exclusively private life (my earlier post on Sarah Kirsch takes up a poet who imagines a totalitarian state as an enclave culture carried out by bureaucratic mechanisms). This is not a poem in favor of democracy over autocracy, in favor of freedom over oppression: it is, in the final line, the married couple that “elects” a secret, elects to be hidden to the world and to themselves.

It is not only an intensely personal lyric; it is a lyric whose intensely personal occasion and focus is itself a target, since for Powell, what is sequestered and secluded, private and paranoid, is a failure of the human imagination and spirit. To keep the secret means to refuse to see that there is something else, beyond it or even within it; the secret that preserves the confines of the marriage is elected as a means of preventing self-recognition, a means of preventing the couple from looking at themselves from without. This is not a poem that contains within itself the traces of the larger world, but that registers the strain from its refusal to open itself to the world it is a diagnosis of miscarried privacy. The poem could have, like Donne’s love lyrics, looked to the union of man and woman, erotic or connubial, as a microcosm of a self-sufficient whole. Instead, it indicts the lie that would claim the two could be a whole in and of themselves: the secret they live by and live within is a part that would claim to be a whole.

“Undercover” is a true poem about the untrue relation of parts and whole; “Trophies” is a poem about a disused part of a larger whole, or a part of a whole that is now mere memory, subject to the changes of wrought by shifting profit margins:

Logged-over hillsides gully and slide out

repeatedly. The creeks run mud for years.

Set back from the road on graded graveled flats

double-wides inhabit isolated clearings.

Second-growth begins to punctuate

the impenetrable new understory

of brush and vines that hide the stump plantation.

Along the brick façade of the single block

of Main Street every storefront is vacant.

In a display-window two mannequins

are prostrated, the male missing an arm.

The door’s drawn paper shade browns and curls at the edges.

On the highway the crossroads burger-stand

is still in business. Its bulletin-board

is the community center. The shelf above it

holds Little League team photos and two trophies.

“All the money left when the mill shut down.

The owners and bosses never lived here anyways

and the people who did don’t anymore, mostly.”

Attending as he does to the contours and markings on the scene, Powell recovers the possibility of knowing the mass of history and society from which it has been extracted—like a geologist determining the composition of the face of a mountain from a boulder. For a reader of this poem, the first impression is likely one of resistance to expectations: the affective, the impressionistic, the metaphorical are evidently subsumed and contained within the material. This is a poetry of archaeological scrupulous measurement, positivist accounting, and observation. Denotation, rather than connotation, dominates. But then, from within that discipline, the words are made to suggest, the objects that Powell describes speak through the terms of description, given voice by the fidelity of the poet’s eye. The line break after “slide out” becomes emblematic of the sliding out, “repeatedly” marking the repetition of lineation; the poem’s form, the language announces, is occasioned by the erosion of the landscape it takes in. “Run mud for years” approaches “run mad for years,” and the difference of the two is the difference of what may once have been the wildness of the wild, and the wild river subdued by the incessant logging and run-off—the life of riot has been left behind. Then, the poem discerns order: “set back from the road on graded graveled flats”—“set back” as if intended, on “graded graveled flats” as if the landscape had been planned, “double-wides inhabit isolated clearings.”  These two lines give me something of the impression of a haiku, where the effect depends on the wider social contexts and literary conventions that a reader needs to know to appreciate what minimal details have been provided. “Double-wides” are manufactured homes, carried into the clearings rather than constructed on them. They can properly be said to inhabit what is not their property, since they are, by their design, unrooted to foundations in the ground. “Inhabit” is the first stirring of life we have seen, and with it environment takes a step closer to the “plenitude” of “social ecology,” though it has not yet cohered, its “isolated clearings” disconnected from one another and removed from the road. But there is more to the haiku effect than the implied freight of conventions and context:

Set back from the road on graded graveled flats

double-wides inhabit isolated clearings.

.

There is, somehow, nothing more that should or can be said: these lines are themselves akin to an isolated clearing, a moment of vision, which speaks of a way of life that cannot be more nearly approached. The effect is like a sudden opening in the mist, revealing a discreet scene of life, soon closed over.

Though it refers to the stirring of new shoots between the stumps, the “second-growth” includes those “double-wides” too, joined in the poem by the coincidence of language that sees “second” mirror “double,” and the hyphens paralleling one another, joining together into new unities pocking the landscape. With the cooperation of social and natural ecology comes a cooperation of word and world, as the second growth is said to “punctuate” the “understory” so that the landscape becomes akin to a text, “impenetrable” still, as a text without the coordinating assistance of punctuation might be.

In the second stanza, nothing happens because nothing can happen in that place anymore. The mannequins are not simply “prostrate,” lying on the ground. It is not even that they “have been prostrated,” at some point in the past. Instead, they “are prostrated” a perpetual, enduring act of submission to time passing, to the change that has made this place a part of a whole that no longer exists, a part of a memory that is already forgotten. “The male” insists on sex rather than gender and on the possibility of procreation that goes with it. The phrase “the male missing an arm” makes it as if a species were being observed. It is cruelly ridiculous not because a mannequin has no sex (to care about that would be comedic) but because it serves as a reminder of the process of regeneration that is impossible in the town. In the first stanza, we saw “double-wides” and “second-growth.” Here we have “two mannequins,,” and in the final stanza we will have “two trophies.” The latter two, both of the town that was, are sterile pairings in the abandoned ark. The sexed mannequins a mockery of generations and birth; the trophies a mockery of victory and pride. Nothing happens but time passes: “The door’s drawn paper shade browns and curls at the edges,” as if it were happening there, before our eyes, what might have been adjectives turned to active verbs in an activity that is not an action. This long line itself lingers, as luxuriating in its finality, itself “drawn” out, extending past the stanza’s edge. The phrase “drawn paper” registers what is not the case: the paper is not drawn on, and rather than disclosing something new, it closes off from sight. There is just the merest hint of self-awareness here, the record of the town that is the poem, on paper somewhere, subject also to slow decay.

“Burger-stand” and “bulletin-board”: these are hyphenated by the choice of a convention, but it is not the only convention, and the hyphens here also register what barely holds together from what was once more complete. These are the last points of resistance against the inevitable. The second and third lines of this stanza open with “is,” and the bald predicate affirms existence, in a town where that is a victory. The fourth line opens with “holds,” suggestive of holds out, holds together, holds forth, all of which are contained in the “holds Little League team photos and two trophies.” The trophies honor themselves for not having been displaced. They have held on.

Most poignant is the poem’s closing quotation: unattributed, dispossessed, its subject effaced. “All the money left,” but not, since these words are spoken, all the people or all the words. There is a glimmer of hope even if no ground for faith that something will renew or persevere, for “and the people who did don’t anymore” is immediately followed by an exposed wire of a word that might contain charge yet, “mostly.” The indeterminacy of the word gives closure to the poem, since this place is not just a husk but contains vestiges of life, even if the life that remains is only good for remembering the forces that it will ultimately not withstand. In the very syntax of the line “mostly” comes as a relief, breaking through the stumbling clutter of “who did don’t anymore,” and denying “anymore” the opportunity to close the poem in an echo of indifference with “anyways” at the end of the preceding line.

“Trophies” allows us to recover by partial inference the lost life of this unnamed place but also to imagine what swept that life away in the life of the nation. Where Powell writes of particular parts of a broader whole, he does so against both the axis of geography and that of history. The poems carve out moments of historical change as well as zones in the larger social and geographic ecology. Powell provides us with an exemplary figure for appreciating what he is up to in the beautiful, brief “Berkeley Sidewalk”:

IN WAR EVERYONE DIES OF SHAME

FREE ANGELA   FREE BOBBY

DIVIDED IS CONQUERED

VIVA CUBA LIBRE

the traces of four index fingers

in setting concrete holding tight

fifty years cemented here

through weather and abrasion

antiquated phrases

in the failing winter light

an object for demented tears

stop to read and linger

FREE OURSELVES.  SEIZE THE TIME

THE EARTH BELONGS TO THE LIVING

The cry for freedom cast in concrete, the words are more and less than they were, relics of the past but reminders of all that has not changed since then. But what the poem records and looks out to is a private experience of the political cry: “traces of four index fingers” –likely two hands, maybe three or four, drawing together, that fact knowable not from the concrete but from memory that has held tight. “Holding tight” in love, in fear, in anticipation (“hold tight”!) or under duress (“the system is still holding tight”), or all of those. The phrase is ambiguous: the traces are holding tight; the concrete is holding tight; the concrete is holding fifty years tight; or the index fingers are holding tight; or the traces are of index fingers that were themselves holding tight. “Setting concrete”: the index fingers moved through concrete as it set, but a possibility that the setting is still happening, that it is not completely set (no more completely set than memory, which never ceases to change). Not only the traces but fifty years, time itself, has been “cemented here,” through “weather and abrasion” and the weather and abrasion of “antiquated phrases” too: the further phrases of further political action weathering these earlier cries, words wearing on word. “Antiquated phrases” are the phrases in the concrete: not irrelevant, but technologically obsolete, no longer serving the ends and means of the time in which we live now. But “antiquated phrases” is syntactically unmoored and might be any phrases recalled from the past or the phrases of the poem itself, growing antiquated in the “failing winter light,” “failing” because they are growing illegible to the eye. “An object for demented tears”: object as objective, as goal; object “for” as serving the needs of, and only the needs of. “Demented tears” are tears that are senseless, without reason, futile in the face of history. They are also tears that arise from dementia, the concrete preserving what the memory will lose. “Stop to read and linger” reverses what we might expect: “stop to linger and to read.”  This poem’s imperative suggests that to read the words will cement the reader in place, at least for a while. “To linger” also does not say for how long, does not say what will break the interruption; it comes last because it is the truer verb for what the poem describes than “to endure.” Things happen, they mark the world, and they linger until they don’t. Then they are gone. Are the final words inscribed in the cement or are they new? Has the poem become its own inscription? Powell is a trained classicist and would know that Greek epigrams often command readers to stop and read, and in so doing imitate the words on funerary monuments directed to passersby. The passersby are pedestrians here; the funerary monument is the slab in the pavement. In the final capitalized words, the poem has become the pavement, the words cemented there (in the concrete) have been cemented here (in the poem) too.  “FREE OURSELVES” complements “FREE BOBBY” and “FREE ANGELA”: free ourselves from being cemented in the past, in our understanding, from the shackles of the mind. “SEIZE THE TIME” is “carpe diem” writ again. “THE EARTH BELONGS TO THE LIVING” is, most interestingly, Jefferson’s phrase in a letter of 1789 to James Madison. These are variously antique phrases but not antiquated; they revive the poem to a place of hope, trace anew an inscription that, in the poem, will linger longer yet. Or maybe they too are written in the concrete—if so, quoted here, at the end of the poem they overcome the poem’s earlier doubts and provide an answer to the “demented tears” that mourn the loss of memory and political hope. A whole past, a fleeting present, and the thought of a whole future give shape to the piece of concrete: it does not contain any of them, but it directs our apprehension of them from its small solid place in the midst of other things.

The grand failures of Modernism respond to the same principle as Powell’s poetry: everything is part of something greater, larger, a whole it cannot entirely contain, from which it cannot be severed or closed off; as much as anything, this is a political principle, demanding a humility before history and the world that find in all presences hints of understanding the complexity of a plenitude what we cannot fully hold in mind but to which we are beholden. But by declining to attempt what must be a grand failure of a totalizing poem, one that absorbs all of the world even if does not pretend to unify it, Powell does not hold himself to be superior to the places he writes about: like them, he occupies a niche, a limited perspective that makes any grand unifying conception of “America” or “American Culture” beside the point. His poems suggest that such an immense and immensely intricate and contradictory thing might exist, but that to get it in its true form means getting at it only in parts that suggest the presence of a whole that need not, and cannot, be made to appear in a single vision.

--By Owen Boynton